My most recent books are the Leader's Guide to Radical Management (2010), The Leader's Guide to Storytelling (2nd ed, 2011) and The Secret Language of Leadership (2007). I consult with organizations around the world on leadership, innovation, management and business narrative. At the World Bank, I held many management positions, including director of knowledge management (1996-2000). I am currently a director of the Scrum Alliance, an Amazon Affiliate and a fellow of the Lean Software Society. You can follow me on Twitter at @stevedenning. My website is at www.stevedenning.com.

The Surprising Reasons Why America Lost Its Ability To Compete

Competitiveness at the Crossroads (2012) is an alarming report with far-reaching implications. Forget the U.S. budget sequester. Set aside the financial bubbles on which the economy currently rests. Pay attention to something much more fundamental: America has lost the ability to compete in the international marketplace.

The report was written by three distinguished professors at Harvard Business School—Michael Porter, Jan Rivkin and Rosabeth Moss Kanter—as part of a competitiveness initiative begun in 2011. As Professor Porter explains, “there was a clear feeling that something different was happening in the U.S. economy—this was not just a deep recession caused by the housing mortgage crisis and so forth… something more was going on.”

The signs of the problem had been visible for some time. Job creation had stalled around 2000. Wages had been stagnating for well over a decade ago. Worse, “virtually all the net new jobs created over the last decade were in local businesses—government, healthcare, retailing—not exposed to international competition. That was a sign that the U.S. businesses were losing the ability compete internationally.”

Let’s ask the Harvard MBA alumni

How had the disaster happened? To find out, the professors had the inspired idea of asking their own Harvard Business School MBA alumni. The results are surprising and, in their own way, illuminating.

The respondents were over 6,000 people “from every sector of the economy, with heavy representation in finance and insurance, manufacturing, and professional, scientific, and technical services. Nearly a third of the 2012 respondents reported a title of chief executive, chair, president, founder, owner, managing director, managing partner, or a similar title at the very top of an organization.”

As graduates of Harvard Business School’s MBA program, they are thus the very crème de la crème of American business, or what the study appreciatively calls “business leaders”.

Since the essence of strategy, as Professor Porter has stressed for several decades, concerns coping with competition, those responsible for strategy—business leaders—will surely shed light on what has gone wrong with American competitiveness and how to fix it.

The role of management in the loss of competitiveness

In the survey, Harvard’s MBA alumni were asked how American business stacks up against its competition on a variety of issues. The quality of management is obviously one of the most important of those issues: if there are disastrous shortfalls in the ability to compete, then surely the quality of management itself—the art and science of getting things done—must have a lot to do with it. Indeed if there are widespread failures in competitiveness across the whole economy, then it is likely that we have something even more serious: a generic problem with the strategies being pursued.

So do the business leaders see the quality of their own management as a problem?

Not at all.

Not only do they see management as a relative strength of American business. They see management as “strongly improving”.

Come again?

American business is unable to compete internationally. But management—relative to competitors—is both strong and improving?

An odd concept of management

What alternate universe are these business leaders living in?

What sort of “management” is it where the quality of management is strong and improving and yet firms can’t compete internationally?

The business leaders indicate in their responses that their high-quality management can’t compete because of government-created constraints, such as the political system, the tax code, the regulations, the legal system, K–12 education, and fiscal policy. In other words, the loss of competitiveness isn’t the business leaders’ fault: “Don’t blame us: we are not responsible!”

Astonishingly, the report itself cites the business leaders’ view that management is strong and improving and the leaders’ own lack of perceived responsibility for causing or resolving these problems, as “good news” and indeed a “great strength” of the U.S. economy (page 6).

The end of “can-do” management?

How can business leaders and the competitiveness report itself be talking about management as strong and improving when firms are consistently failing to compete internationally?

Apparently, this kind of management isn’t about the art and science of getting things done and overcoming constraints, whatever they happen to be. It isn’t the kind of enterprising “can-do” management that opened up the American continent several centuries ago, that constructed the transcontinental railroads in difficult conditions, that won several world wars, that accomplished mission impossible by landing a man on the moon only seven years after setting out to do so, and that invented the Internet and created Silicon Valley from scratch.

High-quality management that can’t compete?

So what sort of “management” is it?

Here the report is helpful. “The basic narrative begins in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Through globalization, it became possible and attractive for firms to do business in, to, and from far more countries. Changes in corporate governance and compensation caused U.S. managers to adopt an approach to management that focused attention on the stock price and short-term performance.” (emphasis added)

As a result, “firms invested less in shared resources such as pools of skilled labor, supplier networks, an educated populace, and the physical and technical infrastructure on which U.S. competitiveness ultimately depends.”

These management actions in turn gave rise to “serious social problems (loss of jobs, stagnating income, growing inequality) and eventually a decline of the public sector (an inability to fund health and pensions, or investments in “the commons” such as infrastructure, training, education, and basic research, fields that the private sector had abandoned.)”

The report thus accepts that the decline of the public sector and the failure to invest in shared resources are not root causes of the decline in competitiveness. They are the consequence of the focus on the short-term and the stock price.

The concept of management that the leaders and the report is talking about is thus management that is high-quality if it succeeds in firms meeting their quarterly numbers and getting their stock price up, even if it means failing in the larger task of competing internationally.

Strong innovation that can’t cope with competition?

A similar picture emerges on the issue of innovation. The business leaders were asked what how American performance in terms of entrepreneurship and innovation stacks up against competitors. The response was again that innovation and entrepreneurship are strong and improving.

And once again, the report hails this response as “good news” and “a strength” for the U.S. economy.

How’s that?

“Innovation” that can’t cope with international competition is “good news” and “a strength”?

Economists that have studied innovation in depth question the premise that U.S. innovation is strong and improving. Thus Nobel Prize winner Edmund S. Phelps recently pointed to studies showing that in the early 1970s the rate of indigenous innovation (as measured by its estimated contribution to the rate of growth in labor productivity) dropped by about half — to around 1 percent since then, from about 2 percent before then.

So what sort of innovation could these business leaders be talking about? When a firm is focused on short-term profits and the stock price, it’s possible that managers are innovating, but with innovations related to efficiency and cost reductions. By contrast, value adding innovations, particularly game-changing innovations, are likely to be viewed as too risky and expensive to invest in. The firm will consistently gravitate to safer cost-saving innovations, even if this approach will set the firm on a track that consistently leads to loss of global competitiveness and eventually corporate death.

And this is what has happened. As Allen Murray writes in the Wall Street Journal, “market-leading companies have missed game-changing transformations in industry after industry—computers (mainframes to PCs), telephony (landline to mobile), photography (film to digital), stock markets (floor to online)—not because of ‘bad’ management, but because they followed the dictates of ‘good’ management.”

Profess Phelps concludes: “A return to the productivity growth and broad economic inclusion of the past will require nothing less than a revival of the high dynamism that underpinned that performance. In the business sector, it is necessary to put an end to infighting in established companies and the shortsightedness of chief executives who know they have only a few years in which to haul in some big bonuses. There is a need for a wider embrace of the old ethos of imagination, exploration, experiment and discovery.”

Where did the short-term focus on stock price come from?

Why do business leaders focus on the stock price and the short-term with such disastrous consequences for management, innovation and competitiveness? Where does this thinking come from?

The answer is close at hand. It was outlined by Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christensen in a talk in November 2011: the thinking comes from the business schools themselves:

“The problem lies with the business schools which are at fault. What we’ve done in America is to define profitability in terms of percentages. So if you can get the percentage up, it feels like we are more profitable. It causes us to do things to manipulate the percentage. I’ll give you a few examples.

There is a pernicious methodology for calculating the internal rate of return on an investment. It causes you to focus on smaller and smaller wins. Because if you ever use your money for something that doesn’t pay off for years, the IRR is so crummy that people who focus on IRR focus their capital on shorter and shorter term wins.

There’s another one called RONA—rate of return on net assets. It causes you to reduce the denominator, assets, because the fewer the assets, the higher the RONA.

“We measure profitability by these ratios. Why do we do it? The reason the finance people have preached this almost like a gospel to the rest of us is that, if you describe profitability by a ratio, you can compare profitability in different industries. It ‘neutralizes’ the measures so that you can apply them across sectors to every firm.”

In other words, “we have discovered the problem and it is us.” Thus behind the problem of competitiveness lies a concept of management based on short term profits and the stock price that these business leaders learned when they were MBA students at Harvard and elsewhere.

This concept of management, that measures results in terms of short-term performance and the stock price, is still the core of what is taught in the business schools across the country today. To see it play out in detail, just read any of the “consulting casebooks” that business schools use. In case after case, the “right answer” to the business problem at hand is to go for short-term profit, and pay less attention to long-run consequences for the firm or the economy. It is this fundamental thinking that drives the business decisions that Christensen calls “just plain wrong” and that are killing U.S. competitiveness.

Shareholder value morphs into C-suite capitalism

Even worse, this concept of management has morphed into something else: C-suite capitalism. Thus the focus on short-term value and the stock price gained traction in the 1970s and 1980s, supposedly as a way of advancing the interests of shareholders and protecting them against the greed of self-serving managers. It was called shareholder value. But the approach had the opposite effect of what was intended. Maximizing shareholder value turned out to be the disease of which it purported to be the cure.

In his book, Fixing the Game, Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, notes that between 1960 and 1980, CEO compensation per dollar of net income earned for the 365 biggest publicly traded American companies fell by 33 percent. CEOs earned more for their shareholders for steadily less and less relative compensation. By contrast, in the decade from 1980 to 1990, CEO compensation per dollar of net earnings produced doubled. From 1990 to 2000 it quadrupled.

Since 2000, the situation has further deteriorated. According to Professor Mihir Desai, the Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance at Harvard Business School, over-compensation of the C-suite has produced a giant financial incentives bubble that is inexorably pushing the US economy into decline. His 2012 HBR article shows how it is having disastrous business consequences, including a serious mis-allocation of capital and talent, repeated governance crises, rising income inequality and a lack of international competitiveness.

Fiddling with symptoms while ignoring root causes

One might have expected that this new report on competitiveness, having identified a focus on short-term results and the stock price as a root cause of the loss in competitiveness, would explore with the business leaders whether they recognize this to be the case, and if so, what they are doing to change it.

Instead, the focus of the conversation with the business leaders was on fixing the symptoms of the loss of competitiveness—particularly rebuilding the talent pool (through training, apprenticeship, community colleges), improving the business context (participating in initiatives like regional clusters, research, startup incubators, or political advocacy) and exploring more local sourcing of products.

Not surprisingly, given the failure to address the root cause of the competitiveness problem, not many firms are actively pursuing these issues. Only 8 percent of respondent firms are “heavily involved”.

In the overall scheme of things, this result is discouraging but perhaps not so important. Even if those measures were being implemented more energetically by business leaders, they wouldn’t resolve the loss of competitiveness. As Professor Porter has reminded us for several decades, if a strategy is misconceived, more talent or more research won’t help: the talent and the research will end up being wrongly directed on short-term gains, not redressing competitiveness.

Not surprisingly, reshoring—which requires rethinking the very basis of competition—was the least-supported action by these business leaders.

What government must do

Consistently with the business leaders’ own viewpoint that the loss of business competitiveness is not the fault of business, the main thrust of the Harvard report on competitiveness is less about what business leaders themselves should do, and more about “the general consensus about what Washington must do”, including controlling federal spending, reforming the tax code and streamlining regulations.

The issue here is not that the report’s recommendations for government are misguided. They are important and necessary. The issue is that they will do little to resolve the problem of competitiveness, so long as business leaders focus on the short-term and the stock price. They are contributory issues, not root causes of the problem.

Missing in action: the customer

Yet the most staggering aspect of the Harvard report on competitiveness is the total absence of the customer. The word “customer” never appears in the entire report. Even once. The report thus gives no recognition to another key issue underlying the loss of competitiveness: the fundamental shift in the balance of power in the marketplace from seller to buyer. This shift flows from globalization and customers’ access to reliable information on the Internet.

The shift is critical because it short-circuits the current business focus on the short-term and the stock price: if firms don’t delight their customers with continuous innovation, their customers vanish and the firms die. Several decades ago, being just a bit more efficient than the local competitor might have been enough to get by. Not any longer. Now in order to survive, firms have to excel with their customers on a global basis.

The only solution to the new dynamic of the customer-driven global marketplace is to adopt a different kind of management with a new corporate bottom line in which value-adding innovation is a necessity, not an option. Instead of focusing exclusively on short term gains and efficiency innovations, the very goal of the firm has to shift to delighting customers through continuous value-adding innovation.

The only valid purpose of a firm: creating customers

As it happens, this thinking isn’t entirely new. Back in 1973, Peter Drucker showed us the way to dealing with competitiveness, by getting back to first principles and addressing the question: why do we have private sector firms in the first place? He wrote:

To know what a business is, we have to start with its purpose. Its purpose must be outside of the business itself. In fact, it must lie in society since business enterprise is an organ of society. There is only one value definition of business purpose: to create a customer…

More recently, Roger Martin writes in Fixing the Game:

We must shift the focus of companies back to the customer and away from shareholder value. The shift necessitates a fundamental change in our prevailing theory of the firm… The current theory holds that the singular goal of the corporation should be shareholder value maximization. Instead, companies should place customers at the center of the firm and focus on delighting them, while earning an acceptable return for shareholders.

If you take care of customers, writes Martin, shareholders will be drawn along for a very nice ride. The opposite is simply not true: if you try to take care of shareholders, customers don’t benefit and, ironically, shareholders don’t get very far either. In the real market, there is opportunity to build for the long run rather than to exploit short-term opportunities, so the real market has a chance to produce sustainability and competitiveness.

Those companies built around an inside-out mind-set—those pushing out products and services to the marketplace based on a narrow viewpoint of their customers that looks at them only through the narrow lens of their products—are less resilient in turbulent times than those organized around an outside-in mind-set that starts with the marketplace, then looks to deliver creatively on market opportunities. Outside-in orientation maximizes customer value—and produces more supple organizations. Embracing an outside-in perspective—focusing on creatively delivering something of value to customers instead of obsessing over pushing your product portfolio—builds an inherent flexibility into organizations.

A paradigm shift in management

Achieving continuous innovation and customer delight lies outside the performance envelope of firms that are built on hierarchical bureaucracy and focused on short-term gains and the stock price. It requires a fundamentally different way of leading and managing—in effect, a paradigm shift in management. It means:

a shift from controlling individuals to self-organizing teams;

a shift from coordinating work by hierarchical bureaucracy to dynamic linking;

a shift from a preoccupation with economic value to an embrace of values that will grow the firm; and

a shift from top-down communications to horizontal conversations.

Dealing with competitiveness thus implies a revolution in the way private sector firms are run. To be sure, improvements in the tax code and streamlining regulations will help. But “business leaders” need to start acting like business leaders and draw on the long tradition of “can-do” management on which the country was built.

Fortunately there are many firms already showing the way. In addition to prominent instances like Whole Foods, Amazon and Salesforce, there are thousands of lesser-known firms on the same track. They have shifted the bottom line of the firm so that the very purpose of the firm is to add value to customers. Thus experimentation and innovation become an integral part of everything the firm does. Companies with this model of management have shown a consistent ability to innovate and compete internationally.

The responsibility of business schools

It’s not just business leaders who need to embrace the paradigm shift in management. Business schools, business journals and consulting firms must also join the revolution. In the age of customer capitalism, should it be surprising, when the customer is totally absent from the thinking of leading business schools, that competitiveness has become an issue? Business schools must stop disseminating obsolete management methods, spend less time blaming the government for the private sector’s inability to compete and instead teach management thinking that is relevant to the 21st Century.

The crisis identified by the competitiveness report is real. The diagnosis of the problem and proposed remedies discussed in the report are not. As Professor Rivkin has said, “the ability of firms in the United States to be competitive in the world economy and to support living standards in America is in doubt.” It will continue to be in doubt unless and until business leaders and business schools deal with root causes.

Obviously, there are brilliant thinkers in business schools who have spoken out on these root causes, including Clayton Christensen, Mihir Desai, Rakesh Khurana, Ranjay Gulati and Roger Martin. But their voices are still on the fringe of business school thinking. They are not yet centrally reflected in the business school curricula. Their thinking needs to move from the margins to the the mainstream. Courses need radical change to reflect the new business context. Research needs to focus on knowledge that is useful to the challenges facing managers today.

One can only hope that the next report of the Competitiveness At The Crossroads initiative will be built on this new thinking and deal with the root causes of the competitiveness crisis and not merely fiddle with symptoms.

A new world is unfolding before our eyes, with new goals and new ways of managing. The only question is whether America’s business leaders and business schools are going to be part of it.

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Gee, everybody recognizes the MBA disease except the MBAs. Not surprising at all, in my experience.

The chart is not the patient, and the spreadsheet is not the enterprise. Or, as Cornelius Vanderbilt is supposed to have said, “any fool can make a railroad pay.” Just stop maintenance. Of course, at the end there’s no railroad left, but you’ve made your numbers and cashed your bonuses as long as it lasted.

These fools made American business pay using the same formula. Now there’s no business left.

Nice critique, but you do miss something essential early on. In addition to “customer” not appearing once in the report, the symptoms the authors list as indicating our loss of competitiveness don’t even mention who buys what from whom.

Last I looked, being competitive meant customers prefer to buy stuff from my company rather than the other person’s company.

They looked at job creation and wages, rather than customers and products in assessing whether U.S. companies are competitive. Then they relied on a survey instead of looking at actual competitive situations and outcomes as their source of information.

This is what passes for research in the world of business? As someone once said, “Management science is to science as plumbing is to hydraulics.”

Steve – excellent article, thank you. One way for companies to start putting the customer at the center of their operations is to better understand their customers’ state of mind and intent when it matters most. Causata’s big data software helps B2C companies better serve their customers through next generation machine learning technologies. We’re helping several of the U.S.’s leading digital media providers, community banks, and online commerce and communications companies every day by giving marketers the intelligence to make more personal offers, ads and promotions. When it works well, 1:1 Marketing can be a very powerful tool for customer loyalty and competitiveness. The difference is Machine Learning; this is an area where American can excel, again. Brian Stone, Causata Inc

As for your comment regarding the placement of the customer at the epicenter of companies operations, look no further than the renowned oratory of Russell H. Conwell. His “Acres of Diamonds” speech made the rounds one hundred years ago and is still relevant to this day.

How ironic that Harvard B-School, the single institution that is probably more responsible than any other for the short-term fast-footwork ‘cash out and screw everyone else’ “school” of management should issue a report like this. And they still don’t get it – it’s on the fringes, there’s no appearance of ‘customer’ etc etc.

Well there’s also something you missed, Mr. Denning, which is that this revelation is exactly what scientists and engineers have said for decades. Decades. Since the early seventies. And in that entire time it has not gotten better – R&D money from all quarters, including the feds, has gotten tighter and tighter. Dubya basically looted research to get cash for Iraq. Companies have been gutting development for decades, long beyond the late ’70s when it became apparent, in Detroit in particular, that corporate-dominated products were junk. GM cars, paradigm example (read DeLorean’s On a Clear Day You Can See GM).

A current and particularly pungent form of HBS crapitalism is the PR campaign about not having enough STEP workers (bring in more from overseas). This is trolling for government favors to reduce labor costs – to avoid market forces that say pay more to domestic workers. There is no step shortage, never has been – engineering salaries have been flat for decades (see IEEE Spectrum annual salary surveys by engineering discipline). So, why and wherefore? Easy – because the HBS model recognizes no value in proprietary technical work. The first thing Rick Waggoner did when he became CEO of GM was to cut R&D by $1 billion. STEP employees are regarded by MBA’s as nuisance children to be put in a sandbox and photographed for the annual report (think stock price).

If entrepreneurship is the activity of creating value, revealing it, building a customer base, then finally reaping equity rewards – HBS management is the exact opposite. HBS paradigm storm troopers take an existing company, destroy its future value by killing R&D, destroy its present value by gutting everything and everyone not creating immediate cash flow, keeping the destruction hidden and cashing out at an inflated price created by deception – faked earnings gains – before the customers start deserting.

Unmentioned here, and I suspect in the report (just like “customer”) is patents. Patent law was completely revamped a few years ago in ways that are virtually guaranteed to destroy the US’s ability to innovate. Patents changed from being based on ‘first to conceive’ to ‘first to file”. The effect is to empower big companies (deep pockets for lawyers) while pushing out inventors and entrepreneurs. A good patent strategy for companies is now to collect intelligence on competitors, win the first to file game with speed and lawyers, then use it to block competition. ‘First to file’ opened the door for purely destructive use of the patent system, blocking and suppressing innovation. Way to go, Congress!

The problem with all of the long-term, good-policy items below is that they take time to implement and create a normal delay that separates cause and effect:

a shift from controlling individuals to self-organizing teams; a shift from coordinating work by hierarchical bureaucracy to dynamic linking; a shift from a preoccupation with economic value to an embrace of values that will grow the firm; and a shift from top-down communications to horizontal conversations.

Meanwhile the legal corporate structure creates an potentially immortal, perpetual “legal person” who has no defined ethics and only a single, solitary duty: to earn a return for investors quarter-by-quarter. That makes investor tolerance for delays in results somewhere between “slim” and “none”.

Therefore, discussing management as a game-changer is a non-starter. What we need to be discussing is the rules of the game as defined by the legislation governing the formation of corporations. We need to stop pretending here. The capitalism narrative is broken precisely because the rules of the game encourage short-term thinking at the expense of genuine systems thinking, which encourages, supports and rewards a longer view. Good long-term policies usually make you a little worse at first, and then MUCH better … after a normal delay. Good luck selling those delays to the ‘shareholder equity’ crowd. Tony Hsieh in his book DELIVERING HAPPINESS discusses this very topic when VC investors from Sequoia Capital engaged in dismissive hand-waving while referring to Tony’s long-term on culture as “Tony’s social experiments”. That’s why he GOT RID OF THEM.

The corporation as currently structured is outdated, encourages truly stupid short-term thinking, is the cause of many sorrows, and may be evil. For an excellent discussion of this dimension of the problem, see the book Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy.

Hey I am trying to be a tax payer again. But you know what, I would rather become one of those rich billionaires. It may not bring happiness but I wouldn’t dread the mailman each day. Oh, I may have a Saturday repreive There’s has to be some good news out there.

The point of the paper/survey is really whether the current business leadership is worthy of their wealth and power. You may be clever enough to manipulate the system or game the system as people like Romney and his financial class have done or maybe you earned it the old fashioned by working harder to develop a innovative technology that radically changed and further evolved our modern lives. Revelation: There is more than one type of capitalist!

What we cannot really seems to discuss is that many really do ” wanna be a billlionaire” like the pop song and its reflecting real feelings – of people who all they think about in their lives is about how badly they need to be rich and powerful. Also not so hard to believe is that some of these people actually are able to become billionaires and to help others become wealthy as well. We have seen with companies like Facebook, Cisco, Apple and Microsoft and why not also see it with regards to superficial and shallow people like Paris Hilton, Donald Trump and Larry Ellison. They too have their coattails. What if in history the type of mentality of the wealthy and the ruling classes is the most important indicator of the future of that civilization? This is why what this article is talking about is so worthy of study and discussion.

My view is that $10 million more than enough – at least to start out? Why does it have to be billions? Why do we need so much money and power concentrated in just a very small group? And many of those billionaires….with Harvard MBAs (or not) parroting a blame everybody but themselves attitude as seen in this study? Its a well worn attitude plagued by rote thinking about the state of the nation as being in decline (which may as well be the same as saying we’ve lost our ability to compete or be competitive)?

The way we see progress as modern people revolves around simplistic bottom line notions of success – as if more stuff does really buy you more happiness and well being. The doom seekers are right this time, we have lost our competitive edge, but the business leadership has been at the leading edge of why America is on the wrong path! The paid professional doom seekers who adorn the media, get their pay checks (usually indirectly) from the uber-wealthy. Then of course they are taught to speak in the media with authority and become part of the establishment. We then as the mainstream society assume it is true what they say because, like our doctors and lawyers, we are taught to see them as the authority about what is going on in the world. Yet in fact their strings are indirectly and discreetly controlled by those with the most money who of course as a result still have the most power in society. American democracy somehow exception in this respect: that the historical truth unbroken in the history of the world’s civilizations – that when too much of the wrong type of people gain power, the society inevitably collapses soon after – is somehow broken with America. This is part of American Exceptionalism and Neoconservative thinking. Why is it that after all our ability to study world history and human behavior in the many schools of higher learning that we have that we are so ignorant of the most obvious? Politics is a constant struggle for power. This affects the whole of society from top to bottom linked together in a epic story unique to each society, community and even going down to the most basic family unit. When the financial and business classes start the blame society itself and absolve themselves of any responsibility, its a key indicator of a society’s demise.

What if our decline is due to the very impact of this kind of short term short sighted thinking on the effective management of the social and ecological resources that will increase long term prosperity? To plan for a sustainable future there needs to be a consideration of more than how much money we have in our pockets and how complex a math equation our high school and college students can calculate. So long as we embrace this mindset of short term thinking, we are really just parroting this ruling groups flawed assumptions and general hypocrisy about not just the economy, but life in general.

The real “ national conversation” we should be having is about what kind of future we want to live the rest of our lives and what kind of place do we want to leave for the future generations.